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@Magusoflight you said that the main thread right now is "wildly boring"; please let me know where this post ranks on the boring/exciting spectrum, and if it's not up to snuff, I'll try to incorporate your feedback into future posts.
The Tyranny of Transhumanism (paywall'd, but it's short, and I'll quote the relevant bits):
It should be clarified that, as a matter of empirical fact, there is no such thing as true "immortality" or "stasis". Entropy comes for us all in the end, and the expansion of the sun in approximately eight billion years will, at minimum, force a change of environs for whomever remains on Earth at that time.
Nonetheless, in contradistinction to the majority of transhumanist aspirations which are of a fundamentally childish nature, there is in fact something to be said for the image thus outlined: the immortal Xi, who stands as the silent and watchful observer, a grim reminder of eternity. (I have specifically chosen Xi's name here as the metonymic signifier of dictatorial immortality rather than Putin's as a token of good faith, and to demonstrate that I'm concerned with structure here rather than content; I have publicly expressed my own harshly critical views of China in the past.)
Of course, in order for the narrative to work, in order to establish the appropriate mise en scène, it can only be Xi who is immortal, and not any of his subjects. He precedes you, and he will outlast you. You will not live to see your great-grandchildren grow to maturity; but Xi will. He measures the seasons of his life by the empires he has seen rise and fall; for you, the turning of the leaves and the thaw of Spring are all that is needed. He stands as the lone pillar that structures a great many ever-changing forces and events, an isolated outpost of stability, made all the more enigmatic by his remoteness from ordinary affairs such as "birth" and "death". You'll never get to find out how the story ends. But he will.
This would, at least, be the portent of a new drama; this would at least give the poets "something to sing about". If nothing else, it represents a vision, instead of the horror of and the recoil from vision. To have a vision is to make a choice, to accept the structural role of sacrifice, to say "yes, that is mine" but also "no, that is foreclosed"; it cannot be otherwise. I am not in any way opposed to the pursuit of immortality. But I am opposed to stasis, to the leveling of difference, and to the "end of history".
The formula of an authentic anti-egalitarian politics is: "if not me, then somebody". We might go one step further and say that, just as the communists have their "heroes of the revolution", so too the anti-egalitarian hero is the one who brings about the state of inequality. The Übermensch, far from being a victorious conqueror, may indeed be the man who, upon noticing that everyone has finally become equal, takes it upon himself to make the sacrifice, to abase himself, to accept a lower station, in order to restore the distinction of rank between man and man.
This is storytelling from Compact Mag, it doesn't have anything to do with reality. Xi's dream is not to 'stop things from changing'. His dream is to make change, to reunite Taiwan into China and make it the most powerful country in the world, reshape the world system.
There's too much mysticism and obscurantism in discourse about transhumanism, I think at least in part because people are pattern-matching mystic, obscurantist religious dogma to transhumanism since both promise immortality and transcendent power. It's story-reasoning, not real reasoning. 'Tyrants don't want change'. Depends on the change! 'Xi Xinping wants to be immortal, as some eternal guardian of Chinese stasis'. That's fiction. Xi is a normal kind of leader. He wants more power. He wants advantageous change but not instability. The whole Marxist dialectic that Xi studies is in large part about systemic change due to technological and social development. He accepts the need to adapt.
The ideas behind transhumanism are actually based on something, it's not schizobabble. They're based on understanding of the human mind as an information system, not a soul or something forever tied to an organic body.
If you can render one person immortal, you can render many immortal. Xi Xinping is very unlikely to be so powerful that he can restrain the rest of the politburo from living together, not to mention business leaders pursuing immortality in secret. Whatever technology that allows for immortality will probably have many other economic and social effects that will likely destabilize the system and bring about new leadership dynamics. If he is so powerful as to suppress human greed for longevity, technological diffusion and economic-military-social transformations of the world, then transhumanism is secondary to whatever his personal hegemony is derived from, that's the interesting thing in this scenario.
This is a story idea. It's super abstract. I just don't see how you can call other, rooted-in-reality discussion of transhumanism childish and then write this.
By "childish" I meant: the abdication of all responsibility, the demolition of any barriers between you and the immediate satisfaction of your desires. Turning the cosmos into an eternal playroom. Traditional Christian "folk" conceptions of Heaven are childish for the same reasons.
Undoubtedly I chose the word for its normative connotations, but I certainly don't think that being childish is a bad thing in every instance. I think that traditional notions of "being an adult", "being a man", etc, are essentially scams, and I take a childish attitude regarding them, and I frequently encourage others to do the same.
There's nothing childish about stories, insofar as it's a story that structures a vision and a mode of life. Stories are how meaning is revealed.
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This is just narrative. What things? Changing how?
It is worth noting that during Xi's reign China has changed a lot. Not in all ways for the better, but that's covered enough. They've become a high-trust society, in many respects higher-trust than the modern West. (So now we have pathetic protestations of things like safety in the streets or general politeness not counting, because it's compelled or whatever). They've doubled energy production per capita (the US has fallen a bit, while say the non-dictatorial UK has fallen off a cliff by 30% and is now far below China). They've transitioned from makers of slippers and "plastic crap" with a pathetically corrupt and infiltrated military and government to a technological superpower half a step behind the US and spooking the US into an increasingly undignified retreat from the Eastern Hemisphere. The list can go endlessly, it's arguably the most staggering timeline of national ascendance since the Industrial Revolution (if mostly by virtue of absolute scale), and of course it can be said that none of that is Xi's achievement, but he sure was well equipped to arrest those and other changes. He, however ineptly, struggled to accelerate them. Wouldn't it be easier to rule over impoverished peasants? Well, probably not. Chinese peasants sometimes used to decide they've had enough, successfully kill their emperors and usurp their thrones. "Lost the Mandate" and all that. Stupid slavish bugmen.
Taking it charitably, we know Xi was interested in Eastern mysticism and would likely love to be an Immortal Emperor. He also would opt to keep stagnant things he genuinely believes are good enough already: the "Democratic Centralism" and other buzzwords for the mechanics of the One-Party State he is lording over. That would necessitate stagnation and repression in significant aspects of culture and society, which we observe. But I'm not convinced a single immortal guy would achieve that better than an ever-regenerating hydra of government and quasi-government actors. Is there some cabal of ancient vampires maintaining American Civil Rights regime? No, they seem to keep recruiting. The Party, as O'Brien taught us, can be immortal even if the individual cell is frail. I think that's the core tragedy of our species – we have functional immortality for crude structures of power, often obfuscated in discourse by handwaving about "memes", but not for humans who, if they don't grow senile, can actually learn and acquire wisdom. Yeah, I think that even immortal dictators can be better than dictatorless dystopias, and it's too easy to build those.
Moreover, Xi said "in this century humans might be able to live to 150 years old". It sounds like he describes the opinion of scientists about the probable outlook for life extension technology, not some secret project he could realistically monopolize. Technology of this nature is, in general, hard to monopolize, and its very realization depends on scale.
I don't think we will see an immortal Ubermensch King in the East. Or at least, there will be a sizable class of lower-tier Immortals cultivating towards ascension – like in those Xianxia novels young Chinese read so much.
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I don't think there's much real danger of a dictator using technology to rule for hundreds or more years. At least, not with plausible near-term technology.
Unless the life-extension technology also gives the dictator some kind of high neuro-plasticity and/or elevated intelligence, at some point the old dictator will be outcompeted by more flexible and/or smarter rivals.
And if the dictator does use technology that elevates his mental flexibility and intelligence, it is difficult to imagine that this technology would be inaccessible to other elites around him for any long period of time.
And if all else fails, the dictator would still be as vulnerable to bullets and poison as he was before the life extension treatments.
In any case, the dictator would still be subject to the normal phenomena of politics.
In general, dictators do not rule because they are transcendently intelligent (they do tend to be extremely intelligent, but not outrageously beyond the normal human standards), and they certainly do not rule because their bodies are invulnerable to bullets and poison. They rule because they maneuver themselves into local political maxima, situations in which the political system as a whole finds it easier to continue with the dictator's rule than to maneuver away from it. I think that even Stalin would have been swiftly killed if the other Soviet elites, as a group, found it more convenient to get rid of him than to put up with him. A dictator who has made many people among the elite wish to get rid of him can only hope to survive for a few hours if powerful insiders around him start to believe that if one of them kills the dictator, they will not be killed by the dictator's loyalists and by other elites as a result.
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I think it's worth pointing out that the tradition of the Chinese communists officially celebrating the WW2 victory over Japan goes back to the long bygone days of...well, 2014 actually, if Wikipedia is to be believed. And the world leaders mentioned were only "snubbed" in the sense that apparently they've never attended any of these celebrations before anyway.
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Anacyclosis and most (all?) other cyclical historiosophies hold that generational change leads to degeneration (n.b. almost all see a few generations in each step, not a single one like the "Hard times make..." meme, although nested models also work.) Like science, all human activity "progresses one funeral at a time". But what if you don't believe in progress? Although tyrants, in other situations ossifying at positive states could do wonders, decrease time preference and much more. A virtuous monarch at 150 years doubles his life span but increases the length of his reign far more, ditto for political members of flourishing aristocracies and energetic democracies.
This is but a straw man. The enlightenment's mechanical, universalist worldview saw the zeitgeist/overton window/fates (socioeconomic factors) driving men forward, replaceable, but slaves to history. Thomas Carlyle rejected this and began a century of hero worship when individuals break past, yea rework the gears of fate into greater human vistas (doomed to succumb to the flaws of fallen men).
But to steel-man your straw man, what value's there granting the masses electronics and the last half-century of "progress" when they yearn for the stability of the 50s? Giving the masses guardrails and a golden path to follow into happiness relieves them of the burden and pain of free choice and demonic/capitalistic/other-pejoratives temptation into squalor. Just as a beast may gorge itself to death, so too do the anarchic masses.
It's not a straw man. It's the view I hold. "If I can't be the king, then somebody should be the king." Gracious in defeat, committed to principle rather than pride.
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Immortality is the usual obsession of Chinese emperors; I suggest Xi drink mercury.
As the most vocal resident transhumanist, I recommend Xi disassemble Mercury to build a Dyson Swarm.
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